"Brilliant...An outstanding demonstration of how analysis of the paradoxes of the postsocialist condition can contribute to anthropological theory and to the critique of Europ-American notions of modernity."-Chris Hann, Max Planck Institute For Social Anthropology
"Masterfully investigates the contemporary performance of distinctive mumming rites as means of interrogating postsocialism...Accessible, engaging, and strong."-Donna Buchanan. Author of Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Mussicians in Transition
In this compelling and evocative study, Gerald W. Creed examines contemporary masquerade rituals in rural Bulgaria for what they reveal about life after socialism-and for what they can tell us about the state of postsocialist studies. Known by local terms such as kukeri and survakari, or in English as "mumming," these rites are all-consuming events in which elaborately costumed performers go from house to house demanding food and drink in exchange for blessings that ward off evil and ensure fertility. Through analysis of these events, which continued to flourish after the collapse of communism, Creed critiques key themes in postsocialist studies, including understandings of civil society, democracy, gender, sexuality, community, ethnic relations, and nationalism. He argus that mumming reveals indigenous cultural resources that could have been used to ease the postsocialist reconstruction of Bulgarian Society, but were instead missed or ignored, and ultimately displaced.
